Astronautic Subjects: Postmodern Identity and the Embodiment of Space in American Science Fiction

Abstract

This essay will deal with the embodiment, or more precisely, the gendering of space since the 1950s. My focus will be on the figure of the astronaut, which I interpret as a continuation of the cowboy and pioneer character in the context of Western, and more specifically, American culture. In the postmodern age, the astronaut is endowed with an important cultural function: Through the image of the spacewalker, gender can be simultaneously negotiated as a fragile construct - given the fact that the 1950s also marked the establishment of new gender roles and new ideas about sexual identity - and restored as an affirmative category in which issues of national and masculine identity are symbolically merged.